Vile Blood (5 page)

“What is it, son? What is it?”

“A thing. There was a thing.”

“What thing?”

Timmy looked over Gene’s shoulder and he turned and saw his sister in the doorway, silent in her bare feet, wearing a T-shirt reaching almost to her knees, blinking at them.

“Ask Skye,” Timmy said.

“Ask her what?”

“About the monster thing.”

Gene, still holding the boy, said, “What’s he talking about?”

“Dunno.” She shrugged, but just for a moment he caught something in her eyes, something furtive, a shadow that slipped away. “Maybe it was the movie that Maria was watching.”

Gene turned back to the boy. “Was it a movie?”

“No. It was out there.” Pointing to the window.

Gene stroked his hair, and the boy clutched at his uniform shirt, trying to hold onto wakefulness, but he drooped and Gene laid him down and covered him.

When he went into the passageway he saw Skye
slipping
into her room. “Goodnight,” he said and if she answered he didn’t hear her.

He went back downstairs and retrieved the glass, took it through to the kitchen and got a rag and went back and mopped up the liquor. When he was down on his knees he saw a DVD cover, the box half-open, a blood-smeared ghoul on the cover under the name
Mutant
Zombie Killers
.

Jesus
.
He’d told Maria a million times. He ejected the DVD from the player and boxed it and slipped the
cover
onto a shelf too high for Timmy. It must have been the movie that scared his boy.

But he saw the bodies around the Dodge.

And he saw his father.

And he saw the tendril of Skye’s hair stained dark.

And he saw his adopted sister sliding like a wraith into her bedroom.

No. He shook his head. No
.
God knew he had already paid for his lies with the lives of his wife and his baby. The debt had been settled in blood.

Gene went into the bedroom and lay on the bed still dressed, his bones heavy with exhaustion and he saw the man with the Jesus face staring at him, looking past the barrel of Gene’s gun, smiling his beatific smile, and as sleep claimed him Gene knew it wasn’t done.

Not yet.

7

Blink. And just like that Junior Cotton was alert. Surfaced from the sleep mode he had been in for five years and three months and two days and three hours and seven minutes and thirty-three seconds.

And counting.

His measurement of the time he’d been
absent
, from the world and himself, was accurate to the nanosecond but he had no idea where he was, or what had happened during those missing years.

“Okay
,
” he whispered,
his voice rusted in his throat
, “let’s take an inventory.”

He was lying on a bunk, staring at a bruised dawn sky sliced into a triptych by the bars of a single high window. A naked bulb, set high on the white enamel wall, caged behind mesh, washed the small room with greenish light. The bulb buzzed and flickered, leaving the room in darkness for point zero four of a second, before it bloomed again.

Junior tried to lift his right arm. Nothing happened. He tried again, and eventually the command crept from his fogged brain and found its way to the reluctant limb, and his arm rose inch by leaden inch, wasted muscles trembling.

The sleeve of an orange jumpsuit slid down revealing a white plastic medical bracelet ringing his bony wrist. His arm was pale as ricotta cheese, hairless, loose flesh dripping from him like candle wax
.
The effort to keep the arm aloft was too great and he let it fall, panting, summoning his strength.

After a minute he felt sufficiently restored to raise the limb again,
took a shaking finger to his face and found a beard so long it brushed his ribs. He moved aside the curtain of hair and sent the finger into his mouth, exploring his gums, finding the cavities of three teeth. Two molars and an incisor. Another incisor rocked like a toggle switch on a loose root.

He rested again, and then set himself a greater task. He tried to sit up. It was almost beyond him, and by the time he came upright—in a series of lunges and hoists—he was wheezing and sweating, his entire frame atremble.

He sat sucking air, vision clouded by a moiré pattern of bright flashes which eventually thinned, allowing him to see that he was in a cell of sorts. His bare feet, toenails long and yellow, rested beside the bolts that tethered the bed-frame to the concrete floor. There was a heavy steel door, with a hatch slid closed. In one corner a lidless privy released the stink of human dung into the air.

The only thing in the room, besides Junior, not bolted down was an old wheelchair, tires worn thin, spokes bent,
corrugated
rubber handgrips soiled from years of use. One of the footrests was missing, and the two small front wheels stood comically pigeon-toed.

Junior sent out a finger again and discovered that his hair was pulled back into a greasy ponytail reaching to his
lumbar
vertebra. He’d always worn his hair to his shoulders, dark blond waves framing his fine featured face with its trimmed beard and soulful eyes, cultivating a resemblance to the masochistic fantasy figure that bled from a billion crosses.

There was no mirror in this cell, but Junior guessed that if he resembled anyone now, it wasn’t the Son of God but one of those hairy clowns who’d postured on MTV during his childhood—he and his mama mocking their sunglasses and
triangular
guitars. It took him a moment, synapses fogged by disuse and (he could only just imagine) toxic medication, before he snagged their name: ZZ Top.

Junior squeezed his quad muscles through the jumpsuit, moving his hands from his thighs to his knees. As soft as suet. Pushing down on the skinny mattress, blanket rough beneath his palms, he rose to his feet, swaying. He took a step and crumpled to the floor, only saving himself from more lost teeth by gripping the armrests of the wheelchair to break his fall. His breath came in uneven gusts and his heart was flighty and over-excited.

Well now, Junior, you certainly have let yourself go, dear heart. His mama’s voice, coming to him so clear that it almost had him weeping.

He dragged himself back to the bed and lay down. When he was able he lifted his arm for another gander at that bracelet. An off-white card was trapped beneath a clear plastic window in the wrist band, and he saw his name scrawled in blue ballpoint by someone barely literate. Then some doodles that could only be the meds he was on.
Li+
for lithium and
Th
for thorazine.

Yummy.

Printed beneath all of this in no-nonsense Helvetica was a name: 
BLACKSTONE FACILITY
. So, that is where he was. All good and well, but not much help.

Junior heard the scrape of a key in the lock and the door opened on dry hinges. Closing his eyes, he had a sense of the air in the room being displaced by a large presence. Smelled meat and gravy, heard the shallow panting of a mouth breather.

“Time to rise and shine, Junior. Time to
rise
and
shine
.”

Junior opened his eyes and saw his savior had come. A huge man, his blackness deepened by the dazzle of his white uniform loomed over the bed. He held out a massive, pink-palmed hand, two capsules nestled in the dark folds of life and heart line. The lifeline, Junior couldn’t help but notice, broke down in a series of Morse-like dashes and ended abruptly, well short of the index finger that sported a ring big enough to
encircle
a napkin in an old-time dining room.

The orderly gripped Junior’s beard and shoved that giant finger into his mouth, the digit tart with piss and shit and commissary slop, depositing the capsules on his tongue. Junior instinctively shifted them to the side, wedged against his cheek, to be disposed of later, the pills bitter as they started to dissolve.

The big man presented his WWF-sized back as he unlocked the brake on the wheel chair and reversed it to the bed. Junior felt himself levitating, defying gravity for a moment, before he was deposited on the cool leather of the chair.

With a piggy-squeal of rubber they were out of the cell and into the narrow, low-ceilinged corridor, claustrophobic as a submarine, the black man’s belly a cushion for Junior’s head as they rolled along against a tide of shambling, dislocated humanity, the staff made distinct from the inmates only by the color of their uniforms.

The orderly’s bass voice oiled out greetings and endearments to each female
staffer
they encountered, the name “Alfonso” dripping from sugary lady-lips in reply.

With each squeak of the wheels, Junior felt stronger. More alert. His senses sharpening. And, as the drip of memory became a trickle, he remembered a woman and a baby and a lawman. The lawman who had stolen from Junior Cotton five years and three months and two days and four hours and twenty-seven minutes and fifty-six seconds.

And counting.

8

When the alarm woke Skye she was shocked that she’d been able to sleep. But she had, a deeper sleep than she could remember. Surfacing, she wanted to crawl under the covers and hide from the world and the blood-drenched images detonating in her memory.

But she stood, still drunk with sleep, and pulled a robe over her T-shirt and pj pants, stepped into a pair of slippers, her hand instinctively searching for her glasses on the bedside table. Glasses that weren’t there. Skye felt a moment’s panic, flashing back to the small man’s pointy shoe crunching her
spectacles
into the dirt.

She closed her eyes and tried to find some calmness. When she opened them the jolt of adrenaline had cleared her head and she saw the bedroom as never before. Took in the dust motes dancing in the beam of hot sunlight that pierced the gap in the curtains; the narrow bed littered with soft toys, way too young for her; the few clothes hanging on the rail in the closet. Skye saw herself in the mirror on the inside of the closet door. She was standing like a girl jock, like one of those hideously athletic bitches who’d shouldered her aside at the school
lunchroom.
Her feet spread, arms relaxed, spine straight. A new strength in her shoulders.

Skye adjusted her posture, slumping, bending a little at the knee until she looked more like the person she knew and then she went through to Timmy’s room and gently shook him awake, manipulating his sleep-heavy arms and legs like a puppet as she got him into his clothes.

When Skye and Timmy walked down into the kitchen, Gene was at the ironing board buttoning his freshly pressed uniform shirt. She glimpsed the jagged scar, like a lightning bolt, running down the ribs on his left side.

Gene must have overslept and he was embarrassed at being seen like this.
T
here had been no women in his life since Marybeth. Probably the last woman he’d touched had been the one who’d scarred him, and his retaliation had been brutal. There was talk for long afterward that the coroner had needed two body bags for her remains.

Skye gave Timmy his cereal and listened to him
gabble
as he ate. A rambling tale about a boy in his class whose parents took him to the ocean where he swam with fish and was dumped by a wave. Timmy had never seen the ocean.

Gene fixed himself a second cup of coffee, which was unlike him, pretending to be interested in the
breakfast show
chirping away on the portable TV on the counter, but she knew he was watching her.

Skye
got
Timmy onto the school bus and when she came back into the kitchen Gene was still dawdling over his coffee. This made her nervous and she chipped Timmy’s bowl against the faucet when she took it to the sink to wash up.

“Last night . . .” Gene said.

“Yeah?” Keeping her back to him, hands in the foam.

“How’d you get home?”

“I walked.”

“Why?”

“Minty found herself a beau.”

“Yeah? Who?”

Skye shrugged, tilting the bowl into the plastic drying rack. “Just some trucker.”

“That Minty sure is partial to truckers,” Gene said, like he was just making small talk. A man who never made small talk. “Truckers and bikers.”

“She’s partial to most anything with two legs and a heartbeat.”

 The words popped out before she could stop herself, and she realized she’d broken character, that for a second another might-have-been Skye had peeped out. She put a wet hand to her lips as if she could reclaim the words and swallow them.

Gene was staring at her. “You walk home past the roadhouse?”

 “Yeah. Why?”
She drained the dish water and dried her hands.

“You see men in an old Dodge? At the diner?”

“There were some guys in an old car. They came in for coffee.”

“They sit down?”

“No. Earl was closing up, so I gave them coffee to go. On the house.”

“And these men, how were they?”

She shrugged. “They were just men. With city ways.”

“They bother you?”

“No.”

“You sure, now?”

“Yes.”

“What did they do, after they left the diner?”

“Took off in the car, up the main street.”

“And you didn’t see them again, near the roadhouse?”

“No.” Getting up the courage to look him in the eye. “What’s going on, Gene?”

“Where are your glasses?”

She touched a hand to her brow. “I broke them.”

“How?”

“Dropped them and stood on them. Last night at the diner. Broke the frame and the one lens.”

“But you can see?”

“No. It’s all kinda blurred. I’ll get me a pair at Walmart, till I have new ones made.”

Gene was still staring at her when his phone rang. He answered it and listened for maybe half a minute then said, “I’m on my way,” never moving his eyes from hers. He stood,  hesitated for a moment, then he
took
his hat and walked out the door.

9